Funny Pages #6

This is the Sapphire Eye of Sehkmet. You can tell the silver-tongued characters by the size of their word balloons.  Should "silver-tongued" be a stunt?  Cash it in and you get an auto success on a encounter reaction roll or SCM recruitment roll?  It bears consideration.

Every Editor/Dungeon Master/Game Referee runs into this problem sooner or later.  You want a dying messenger to deliver a cryptic, suspenseful clue to the Heroes, but what to do the players do?  Instead of saying "You're wounded!  Speak to me!" they say "Don't speak, just rest.  Here, I've got a first aid kit..." or they just cast a cure spell and fix the problem even sooner!  Now there's no shortage of information they can get out of your dying messenger.

Hideouts & Hoodlums, at least, gives the Editor the out of the save vs. plot mechanic.  You want to violate the tropes of adventure fiction and save a guy clearly meant to die to service the plot?  Roll for it!

Reading the craziness that is The Stone Age usually hurts my brain, but at least this time we get a possible gaming tip out of it.  I've previously discussed what to do with skunks in the game, but here we see skunks being used to trigger morale saves.

Loony Louie the Fire Chief buys a magic trophy, a -- what should we call that?  A Flute of Rope Tricks?  Playing it allows him to control the movement of rope or something shaped like a rope, like a fire hose, within 5' of him.  H&H players should not normally expect to be able to buy magic trophies on the street, though.

Now, you and I both know that there is no reason Jimmy and Jean could not have simply sat in their car and waited for the storm to pass.  It is simply a trope of fiction that, when it is stormy outside, you must seek shelter in a strange building, no matter how creepy and suspicious it is.  So, Heroes should have to save vs. plot to resist seeking shelter when storms come.



(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Comics Magazine #5

This is a page of Age of Stone and as highly improbable as this combat is, a more realistic combat in Hideouts & Hoodlums likely would have ended with this cavewoman crushed to death by this cave bear! Cave bears are mentioned in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies, as having more Hit Dice than brown bears.

No, that price in the window isn't a joke. I reviewed old menus from the 1940s (like on sites like this one) and found that there were diners circa 1940 where you could get a nice dinner for a dollar.

This page of Natural History meshes well with H&H, in that Book II featured a fair assortment of prehistoric mammals for the game (and dinosaurs were largely left for the supplements). Though informative, I still don't particularly feel that prehistoric horses need to be statted for the game.



(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Comics Magazine #4

According to Poss, all lieutenants have mustaches. Keep that in mind, Fighters, when you reach 4th level (level title: lieutenant)!

Yes, it's hard to take a feature as goofy as Age of Stone seriously, but this idea of fishing for electric eels and using them as weapons might have some merit, particularly if the Heroes have to bypass a guardian in a pit or a tunnel too small for the Heroes to get into.

Giant eels appear in Supplement II: All-American, but they are giant conger eels and not electric eels. Making the change should be easy, maybe dropping the Hit Dice to 2+1 and adding 1d6 of electricity damage when they hit.

Despite what Freddie Bell, He Means Well would have you believe, popping balloons should not cause damage. Spankings, maybe, depending on how hard someone is hitting (1-3 points maximum).

A 1' long tarantula sure would scare me, but it wouldn't even rate a single hit point in how Hideouts & Hoodlums works (in case you're wondering, an animal needs to weigh around 30 lbs. to warrant a hp).

It's interesting, though, how the spider seems to be making them dance. In a certain edition of That Other Game (Frank Mentzer would know which one I'm referring to) is a pun-laden monster called the tarantella spider.

This page of Natural History talks about moose. As funny as moose are, they never seem to get the love that goats get in these early comic books.

Now, according to Wikipedia, moose are more dangerous than bears and wolves, so it looks like we have another herbivore that needs statting for equal representation. Moose I would give 4+1 HD and allow to trample for 2-8 points of damage.

This page of Klondike Gold almost cries out for a brutal fumbles chart added to the combat mechanics, but I am loathe to add such a thing to H&H.  I think we have to chalk this up to Doc actually hitting, but the switch of weapons for irony being mere flavor text.

This is not the first Dickie Duck; the first "star" anthropomorphic animal created for comic books to rate a cover appearance had been slinking through the back pages of at least two publishers already. I include him here only to demonstrate how, in a certain type of campaign, funny animal characters and humans could live together.



(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Comics Magazine #3

While not scintillating drama, this page of The Further Adventures of Jane & Johnny does well illustrate three combat turns in Hideouts & Hoodlums.  Turn 1 is a surprise turn, won by the outlaw.  But he misses! (maybe rolled an 8 on his 20-sided die?)

On turn 2, Captain Bill can act. His movement intentions are to just get off the horse and behind cover, which the Editor rules is close enough nearby that he can do both in the same move. Rather than shoot at Bill while he has the benefit of cover, the outlaw forfeits his attack roll for this turn and moves instead, to get closer. Bill's player also develops the "boot plan" before turn 3 begins.

Now, technically, only a Mysteryman should be able to move silently behind an opponent like that and get another chance at surprise, but Bill's player asks his Editor to go easy on him and give the outlaw a save vs. plot to avoid being fooled by the boot plan.  The Editor goes along with it, the outlaw fails (unlucky dice rolls!), and then Bill succeeds at his surprise roll for turn 3.

On surprise turn 3, Bill may have missed a save vs. plot to shoot a man in the back (very un-heroic!), so now his player is hoping that the outlaw next fails his morale save, rather than turn around and shoot it out.

There is, incidentally, no mobster-type called Outlaw; this is likely a Chaotic Cowboy instead.

Alley Oop's animal of the day is -- oops, that's not Alley Oop, but a disturbingly Chibi Manga-like Alley Oop knock-off.  Anyway, it does feature an archaeopteryx, and the first in comic books. Should that get it statted? Actually, archaeopteryx was so small, it wouldn't even warrant a single hit point.  Maybe an archaeopteryx swarm would be a threat, like a big enough bat swarm...

Now, woolly mammoths, on the other hand, are a worthy challenge for Heroes, and are in fact already statted in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies. There's also -- huh?  Kangaroos and chimpanzees?  Oh well.  By coincidence, both of these will be statted in the upcoming Supplement V.

Yeah. This page has nothing to do with H&H, other than to demonstrate how much I go through to support the scholarly content of H&H and this blog. The early Comics Magazine/Centaur comics are just astonishingly racist sometimes, and I'm aware of the blackface tradition this stems from, but this page is just so racist it could make a KKK member blush with shame.

And I do it for little gems like this.  Who doesn't want to stock their hideouts with two-headed pigs now?  I'd make it 1+1 HD and give it just one bite attack, though.

Cougars were statted in Book III: Better Quality.

The stats for bears in Book II: Mobsters & Trophies is intended for brown bears. Black bears should "just" be 6 Hit Dice.

Frontier Justice -- the source for the Raise Posse Stunt for the Cowboy class.

Lastly, we have the Sapphire Eye of Sehkmet, a gem that sounds like it functions as a magic Ring of X-Ray Vision.



(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum at http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=15437)